There has been a dramatic increase in recent years of the availability of public digital grade networks, such as the World Wide Web ("WWW") on the Internet, to exchange information in voice format. Applications have been generally limited so far, however, to specific preselected person-to-person conversations, however, like an "Internet phone."
Numerous new and useful applications would become possible, however, if full duplex asynchronous voice conversations, such as may be exchanged over the WWW, could be seamlessly integrated with synchronous conversations, such as may be exchanged over the Switched Public Network ("SPN") and other more traditional voice-carrying networks. In this way, a very wide user community would become immediately voice-networked, since multiple devices (primarily telephones and computers) would potentially be supported at the same time to facilitate, for example, point-to-point communications, or multi-party broadcasts, or multi-party conferences.
Such connectivity would readily address needs in the art such as allowing a WWW user (with full duplex asynchronous voice capability) to be selectively connected to a live agent who was also serving synchronously-connected remote users.
For example, a WWW user might be accessing a website offering catalog-type merchandise and receiving automated voice messages that describe the products and facilitate purchase thereof. Advantageously, these automated voice messages would be available in parallel with traditional visual functionality accessible through standard web browser technology. This session would be immediately enhanced if the user could selectively call up a live agent to intervene. Alternatively, the user might want to go directly to the live agent and bypass automated speech functionality. At the point when intervention by a live operation was desired, it would be useful if the user could call the agent up by means known in the art, such as clicking a mouse on a specific screen zone, or saying "operator."
It would then be extremely useful if the live agent could also serve synchronously-connected remote users, as well as asynchronously-connected remote users calling in from the Internet. In this way, for example, live agents could be drawn from a pool also available to other users over standard telephony connections.
Further, it would be useful if the remote Internet user could also be directed to a live agent physically distant from the website or agent pool. In this way, a remote specialist (such as a loan officer in the bank website example) could be called in occasionally to answer very specific questions, while routine business was being handled by general agents.
In an alternate example, it would be useful if multiple remote users communicating through computer voice functionality over, for example, the Internet, could be conferenced with multiple remote users communicating through standard synchronous telephony links. Large scale conference calls would be facilitated, such as for "electronic town hall meetings". Alternatively, a feed from the conference could be sent to be broadcast, thereby enabling wide audience participation in a radio talk show.